Ramblings

Discovery has finally left the launch pad. It’s nice to finally be back in action.

Finally, some of my biggest gripes with Google Maps have been resolved. They have added a “Hybrid” mode and a scale!

OK, web-based email seems to be working. I don’t know what caused the bottleneck last night, but it seems to have cleared overnight. To complicate matters, Gmail seems to be responding very slow the last few days and I think that messed with my tests.

OK, I admit it … I broke the email server. We are recieving email just fine, but it does not seem to be sending email at all … even from localhost, which is a bit scary. I’ll be making some backups of all our email in the morning (not that it is at risk) just in case I screw something up royally while trying to get it to work. I still have my main config files from before the upgrade, so I might be able to drop back to the last working state if it looks like it will be a while. Stay tuned for more information.

I will be doing some planned maintainance over the next few days. It’s well past time to upgrade some of the installed versions of the email server software and I’m not sure how smooth that process will go. Hopefully it will go well, but for anyone who might look here first … be forewarned.

Wow! Mark (my officemate) pointed this one out today. Amabuddy is a phone based interface to the AmazonAPI. You call the 617 number or the toll-free number and enter an ISBN. Once you’ve done that, it reads back some basic information like the book rating from Amazon, the list price, Amazon’s price, and the best Amazon used price. Their website even will let you recall the list of books you’ve searched for once you get back to a computer. Way too cool.

Why is it that bookstores never seem to have all the books you want when you go in? For instance, you can find books one and three, but never book two. Or, you find books two and three, but not one. Err. So I stopped in at Booksamillion this evening since I finished up the last of my available reading material. I went in with the intention of buying about 15 books. Enough to get me going again and not have to worry about running back anytime soon. I ended up buying less than 10, but those ten are not the complete sets that I was hoping to get. Go check out my reading list to see what I’m up to … the books that are currently marked as “I own this” and under the unread section were the ones I bought tonight, and the ones marked “On order” and under the unread section were ordered tonight … I think you get the idea.